THE MAKING OF: ASTROCLONE

The UK games magazines of the Eighties worked really hard to connect with their teenaged readers, with the likes of Crash and Zzap!64 even going as far as trusting their reviews to schoolkids.But despite these recommendations, the sales charts of the day often included games that received scathing write-ups in the computer press, and omitted others that reviewers had heaped with praise. Steve Turner’sAvalon and Dragontorc fell into the second category, and so rather than continuing the fantasy adventure series, he devised a genre-defying sci-fi follow-up to the trilogy of shoot-‘em-ups that had launched his career. “The whole point of Astroclone was that Andrew Hewson had told me that a third game in the Avalon series wouldn’t sell,” Steve acknowledges. “He said that there had been some really poor sales for the games and that I needed to do something different. So I tried to shake it up as much as I could using as much of the same code as the previous titles to make it commercially viable – I couldn’t just start from scratch.”